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Well, we learned one thing above all tonight, CheatyPants McSweatervest plainly runs a clean program after all — because no dirty program gets beaten like that. Like what? Like red-headed step-children, like Notre Dame in any bowl of recent memory, beaten almost as bad as Oklahoma in 2004 2005.

PWN3D! (Charles Krupa, AP)

I don’t like tOSU at all, not least because of the Michigan-based in-laws… I have to give them something back for the last 2 Rose Bowl beatings, it’s only fair.

So when I saw Ginn run back the opening kick-off for a touchdown, and the Pac-10 officials miss a splendid hold, I was not best pleased.

However, two amazing things came to pass — and bizarrely, Chris Leak was one of them:

You can apologize later, if your mouth’s free… (Ross Franklin, AP)

The other site to behold was Florida’s defense absolutely running amok on tOSU — Troy Smith started out a bit flat and got flattened. There was one play — I think it was 2nd & 15 at about 10 minutes in the 4th quarter — where Smith was just levelled by Florida player Ray MacDonald because no Buckeye had taken the time to block someone running straight at their QB on the fucking blind side! Frau DC Trojan, no fan of the Buckeyes, had wandered into the living room and was appalled for young Mr. Smith, which underlines the overall suckitude of the tOSU O-line.

At this point, even I was starting to feel sorry for Smith because the combination of O-line ineptitude and the Heisman curse was proving to be too much, and he’d already been spitting turf a few times…

Any way that you slice it, Florida had it all over the Buckeyes, in coaching and execution. Frankly, I don’t know that it would have made much difference if Ginn hadn’t been injured; I suspect Reggie Nelson would have got to him eventually.

My remaining thoughts on the game:

Troy Smith didn’t resort to putting towels on his head, he remained engaged with his team-mates, and he was quick to congratulate Leak. A classy response to a bad situation.

However, it took an embarassingly long time before the tOSU defense learned that trying to intimidate the Gators by dirty play wasn’t going to work. Like, 2 short field possessions and 2 touchdowns long. Plainly the obviously clever Anthony Gonzalez doesn’t have a brainiac equivalent on the defensive side of the ball. But it might not just be native wit, mind you, this is the same team culture which showed up in 2003 when they couldn’t have been more obviously trying to cripple Braylon Edwards…

Can we all agree now that zone defenses don’t really work well for the Big 10 in bowl games?

Not content with nearly blowing Ian Johnson’s proposal post-Fiesta Bowl, Chris Myer’s attempted to ambush Reggie F Nelson with a post-game question about his mother, who died December 21, 2006 of breast cancer. Can we all agree that a big FUCK YOU is in order here? That’s not cool, Myers, people are animals too, so have a goddamn heart.